#1 3 Reasons why yoga unsucks your life (Part 1) – Ian

So, this is wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy overdue and requires to be put out here for this little bit of the world to see. Here it is.

IT BRINGS YOU AWARENESS OF THAT ‘LONG TERM PATIENT’ SIDE YOU’VE NEVER CULTIVATED BUT ARE VERY OBLIGED TO BE EXERCISING IN YOUR DAILY LIFE.

Following my discovery of the fact that a close friend of mine was leaving work to pursue a self made career as a fitness instructor, I grew very interested in the outcomes that yoga had for me as an individual. This was only more apparent after I convinced myself to attend then one of his classes when he was going through the YTT programme. I still vaguely recall the first day i stepped into the yoga studio doing my first lesson with this bunch of more than competent yoga practitioners/teachers to be. ‘It was a really good experience!’ is really far off from what I’d have said then when it was happening but it was a very good experience. 😉 The idea of yoga was still very abstract to me then, isometric by nature, one would hold or brace one’s body into a posture which involved the recruitment of various contractions and stretches from different muscle groups. I obviously could see the benefit in it at face value, but it isn’t as simple because you don’t simply go into a pose and reap its benefits. Even if you did, these ‘benefits’ would be very unique to an individual due to reasons like the unique anatomical make up of every individual and its limitations/constraints (for the lack of a better word), one’s awareness of body and allignment which is no big surprise really. So i realised through the course of my practice some time later that anyone, me included going about thinking ‘I’m super ______ and I know just the pose to fix it because this pose is meant to do ________!’ would inevitably meet with disappointment because the outcomes which one would have had in mind in doing the pose in the first place wouldn’t have materialised. We live in a time where information or stimulation is so readily available. Information that you need, connections that you’ve missed or even things that you’d otherwise have to take a boat and sail for 10 years to go buy are now available to us within seconds at a fraction of the work it wouldve taken. I don’t see anyone Marco Polo-ing their yoga pants these days so this has to be true! So just like the ‘yoga pose fallacy’ we’ve looked to a magic pill that is the yoga pose to solve our ‘inflexibility’,’weak body’ blah blah and everything that is presumably bad with us. Funniest bit is that the problem isnt that one (Im refering to me) is not flexible, but that one has not taken the necessary efforts to or learnt enough body awareness to allow one’s body to achieve this with whatever mediums one chooses. Gymnasts are flexible, acrobats are really flexible. Even Shao Lin monks are flexible. They dont stay in down ward dog 2 hours a day. But I’m pretty sure they understand that in order to do what they do, they have to do it mindfully and take action which would only serve that purpose. When i reflected on this I realised a huge portion of my life could have been or could be unsucked because if I were half willing to understand the process more than the possibilities of the outcome, I would have changed or done so much more.